For decades Burma was in the West’s too-hard basket, but in the year since President Thein Sein launched a program of reform, politicians like Hillary Clinton and David Cameron have hastened to associate themselves with the process. This engagement is not without its hazards: moral jeopardy arises at the very outset, with the question of what to call the country. Rogers calls it ‘Burma’ rather than ‘Myanmar’ (as it was officially renamed in 1989), in deference to the Burmese opposition, which argues that the military régime didn’t have a mandate to change the name. Until now Australian officials have largely stuck with ‘Burma’, but in June Foreign Minister Bob Carr, in a gesture of recognition towards Thein Sein’s reforms, raised eyebrows by using ‘Myanmar’ instead.

This opens the door to the broader question of the extent to which Western governments should defer to a régime that, for all its promises, remains firmly in power. Do we give credit to the leopard which explains that changing spots is a complex process that cannot happen overnight? What happens if the military change their mind about permitting reform? This is the question facing Burma’s Western interlocutors ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2015, which analysts believe will be the real test of the régime’s intentions.

In the wake of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s recent entry into mainstream politics, the release of Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads has near perfect timing. But while the book is strong on why things in Burma must change, it is less instructive on what must change and how this could happen. The curious reader wants to know more of the historical and regional background than Rogers offers.

For example: the Burmans, two-thirds of the population, dominate the country, with seven other major ethnic groups and scores of smaller ones dotted in and around the rest of the country. This ethnic mosaic, with its deep historical roots, is the geography of Burma’s political malaise. More than a third of Rogers’ book is taken up with a description of non-Burman groups like the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Kachin, Chin, and the Rohingyas, the last being Muslims who live in Arakan state along the Bangladesh border and are particularly vulnerable. His account of these peoples’ plight certainly adds weight to the moral argument for reform. Beyond that it would be interesting to know how these groups coexisted, or failed to, with the Burmans and each other in pre-colonial times. But Rogers doesn’t discuss Burma’s history prior to its occupation by the British. His account of the period leading from the birth of the Independence movement in the 1930s up to the protests of 1988 occupies one short chapter. But a lot happened in that time: starting with the first military coup in 1958, the Burmese Army entrenched itself in the power vacuum that stemmed from the inability of civilian institutions to securely establish themselves.

This is the curse of the post-colonial state: Burma is not the only country in Asia – or for that matter in the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, or the former Soviet Union – whose post-independence history has been dominated by a failure to reconcile ethnic and sectarian diversity with democracy. Nevertheless, to be viable Burma must solve the problem, as Aung San Suu Kyi recognised in her first speech to the parliament in late July, in which she pronounced as her goal ‘a truly democratic union with a spirit of the union, equal rights and mutual respect’.

The misery of its inhabitants has been compounded by the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, which led one of the richest countries in South-East Asia, as recently as the 1960s the world’s top rice exporter, not to economic and social justice but to poverty. Reviving the agricultural sector and alleviating rural poverty is another prerequisite to the establishment of a durable multi-ethnic polity. But despite alluding to the issue in a chapter heading entitled ‘From Rice Bowl to Basket Case’, Rogers has very little to say about the rural economy, the main concern of the majority of Burmese.

Another question raised but not answered in the book is the seeming paradox of militant Buddhist chauvinism. On the one hand this has been fostered by the authorities: Rogers points out that Prime Minister U Nu’s 1961 declaration of Buddhism as Burma’s state religion was among the triggers for revolt by the Kachin people, and gives recent examples of the régime’s aggressive Buddhist proselytising among Christian and Animist minorities. On the other hand, the ‘Saffron Revolution’ of 2007, one of the more serious recent challenges to the régime, brutally suppressed, was actually led by Buddhist monks. But the reader gets no sense of how the military establishment reconciles building pagodas with shooting monks.

Then there is the absence of a discussion of Burma’s relations with its neighbours. It is not that Rogers is unaware of the issue: in one tantalising aside he tells us that among the factors driving reform is Thein Sein’s realisation that the ‘current diplomatic isolation leaves Burma with no option but to become a Chinese client state’. This opens up a large and fertile field of discussion, which Rogers ignores entirely.

The analysis comes in the last chapter in the book. Rogers looks forward to a coming era of régime change driven by ‘traditional methods of mass popular protest combined with the use of modern technology (including social media) to communicate developments’. He cites developments from the level of global diplomacy, such as the United Nations’ ‘Responsibility to Protect’ mechanism, down to that of the individual, with the proliferation of NGOs and the positive role played by volunteers, as combining to spell the end of repressive régimes, in Burma and elsewhere.

This is heartening, but, as Rogers points out, Burma still has a way to go. In early June, ethnic violence broke out in Arakan state between the Rohingyas and the Buddhist Rakhine people, in which scores of people have been killed. This violence cannot be laid entirely at the government’s door: as Rogers points out, ‘there are indeed tensions between the Burmans and the non-Burmans which go beyond the regime’. But the authorities failed to intervene to halt the Arakan violence, showing the limits to expectations of a reformist Burmese government, even one including Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues in the opposition National League for Democracy.

One gets the impression that Rogers intended his book largely to ensure that the Clintons, Camerons, and Carrs of this world keep up the pressure on the régime. It will probably succeed at this, and Rogers will deserve credit for his work. But, for all that, there is a sense that he is preaching to the converted, and with a title proclaiming that Burma is ‘at the crossroads’ it would have been good to have a bit more of an idea about how the country got there and where it might be headed.